August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean (Photo by Benjamin Rose Photography)
The “Hard Problem” — David Chalmers‘ term for the scientific struggle to explain consciousness — is increasingly entering the cultural conversation. We still don’t understand why physical brain processes give rise to subjective, first-person experience: the felt quality of seeing red, of grief, of joy. This mystery sits far beyond what philosophers call the “easy problems” — explaining cognitive functions like perception, memory, and learning — because it asks not how the brain processes information, but why any of that processing feels like something at all.
Theories abound from physicists, biologists, philosophers, and quantum scientists, but consensus remains distant. Science writer Michael Pollan takes up this struggle in his new book, A World Appears: a Journey into Consciousness. And a decade ago, Tom Stoppard wrote The Hard Problem to explore these questions in dramatic form — which is fitting, because theater may be uniquely suited to holding what science cannot yet resolve.
Some call the consciousness question a Copernican revolution — a shift that will fundamentally reorder how we understand ourselves and reality. Just as elaborate geocentric models eventually collapsed in the 15th century, many believe we are living through a similar moment of reckoning. How do we hold the whole of it?
Two plays currently running in Boston address two of history’s primal paradigm shifts. Hugh Whitemore‘s Breaking the Code (Central Square Theater) and August Wilson‘s Gem of the Ocean (Actors’ Shakespeare Project) approach this question from opposite ends of the world. One is a cool British chamber piece about a gay man who cracked the Enigma cipher and was then broken by his own government. The other is a fiery incantation set in an African-American Pittsburgh rooming house in 1904, conjuring the ancestors of a people who crossed the Atlantic in chains. What they share — and what makes seeing them together so startling — is a preoccupation with concealment, and with the cost of not being fully known.
In Whitemore’s portrait, Alan Turing is a man capable of holding paradox and complexity in his mind with unusual grace. But what the world demanded of him was concealment. Unlike others willing to mask their truth indefinitely, Turing could not sustain that deception and remain himself. His death was ruled a suicide following his conviction and forced chemical castration for homosexual acts. He was 41.
In Gem of the Ocean, Citizen Barlow arrives at Aunt Ester’s door carrying a similar burden. He has betrayed a man to save himself, and that betrayal has hollowed him out. To be restored, he needs to be witnessed in full — without evasion, without edited self-presentation. Aunt Ester does for Barlow what no institution could do for Turing: she holds the whole of him.
In a departure from Wilson’s characteristic harsh realism, Aunt Ester brings a powerful mysticism to this story of oppression and concealment. She is a “washer of souls” who claims to be 285 years old — a figure less character than living archive, embodying every year of Black American suffering since the first enslaved people arrived on these shores. She oversees Barlow’s healing journey to the City of Bones: that underwater vision of the Middle Passage where the drowned ones stand upright on the ocean floor. Here is a civilization that never arrived, a people whose first act on American soil was to drown in sight of it. And yet in Aunt Ester’s ritual, those bones are not only mourned. They are invoked. The dead are not gone but are the ground beneath every living step.
Both plays are concerned with decoding. Turing breaks ciphers literally; Aunt Ester enables Citizen Barlow to decode the meaning of his own life and inheritance. Both are also stories of how a prevailing belief — about what a person is permitted to be — distorts and finally destroys, leaving a legacy of loss that outlasts the individuals it consumes. Seen together, they make a quiet argument: that the hardest problem of consciousness may not be the philosophical one, but the human one. The difficulty of being fully seen. The rarity of someone willing–and able–to hold it all.
Both productions are deeply moving and beautifully realized. Central Square Theatre and Actors’ Shakespeare Project have once again demonstrated why Boston theater deserves to be taken seriously. Gratitude is very much in order.
Breaking the Code runs through May 3 at Central Square Theater, Cambridge. Gem of the Ocean runs through May 17 at Hibernian Hall, Roxbury.